Garden Q&A: Edible ginger plants easy to grow

Can we eat ornamental gingers or just the ones that they sell in the grocery store?

Ornamental gingers are a staple in shade gardens in Florida and the plants span a wide variety of sizes, shapes and colors. There are tall butterfly ginger and just as tall variegated ginger, pine cone gingers and little 6-inch kaempferia (peacock gingers). The edible ginger you can buy at the grocery store is in the same family, but it is the only one that people usually eat. The ornamentals don’t have much flavor.

Edible ginger is very easy to grow here. A piece of one from the grocery store or farmers market is the easy way to start a clump of plants. They like a little more sun than many of the other gingers but are just as easy to grow. The stems and leaves will get to be about 3 feet tall. The flavor is going to be best from midsummer on, since some of the plant’s energy is used to grow the new stems each spring. Like their cousins, they “disappear” underground for the winter.

When you are ready to harvest some, just dig down in the ground to the rhizome and break off an appropriately sized piece.

I have two bottlebrush plants. One is going great and the other is not doing as well. It’s lost some of its leaves and has lichen growing on the stems.

Bottlebrush plants aren’t hard to grow, but my research after you called reminded me they do not like excessive water. It’s a problem we’ve been seeing off and on over the last few years. Given that the last year has been pretty damp, many plants in the area are showing stress from the wet conditions we have been experiencing.

Even though both plants are in your yard, I’ll bet that the one doing poorly is getting roof runoff or some other source of extra water. Maybe the water in the area temporarily pools near the ailing plant.

A small trench may help to carry excess water away. The lichens are just hanging out in a sunny space. Get the plant canopy healthy and lush with leaves again and the lichens will have to find someplace else to live.

If you think you may be complicating things with your sprinkler system, please take steps to reduce the amount of water in that zone.

There’s a black beetle in my roses — does this mean I have Japanese beetles? I’ve tried spraying them, but I keep finding them inside my roses as the flower opens.

Thankfully, we do not have Japanese beetles here. I have battled them in two northern cities and won’t mind if we never see one of them.

They are iridescent green, kind of squared-off little bugs and they do a boatload of damage.

You have a simple little pollen beetle. You saw the insects, but never saw any damage like chewed petals or leaves. All these insects do is to eat pollen and nectar from the flower. They cause no harm at all and serve as pollinators. So you can just leave them alone.

If you want to cut some roses and bring them inside to enjoy, you can give them a good shake to throw the insect off, or simply put the cut roses in a bucket of water and weight them down so that they are submerged. Any insects on them will scurry for the surface and climb back out so that they can breathe. It’s something I do so that I can bring gardenia blooms inside minus the tiny ants and thrips.

I don’t want to keep bees, but I’d like to help pollinators. How can I make a nest area for solitary bees like mason bees or leafcutter bees? They seem interesting.

They are interesting. I am particularly fond of the leafcutter bee, which cuts a circle of leaf out of rose leaves that looks exactly like an 8-year-old was turned loose in the garden with a hole punch. Solitary bees, as their name suggests, live alone. The females hollow out an area and lay their eggs, along with some food for the larvae. They do minimal damage to plants and don’t impair the health of the plants at all. They are totally non-aggressive.

I watched my blueberry bushes this spring and think the wild bees and tiny wasps worked harder at pollinating them than the honeybees. I see a lot of wild bees on my citrus every year, too.

Since you have indicated a preference for mason bees or leafcutter bees, I would recommend you take a block of wood (not pressure treated) and drill holes in it as described on the Xerces Society pollinator website at www.tinyurl.com/d752m7. That site is a wealth of information about pollinators anyway.

The lower half of a dead tree trunk is also very useful in a homeowner’s yard. It serves as a bird and beneficial insect condominium as it slowly decomposes. Positioned properly, it will cause little or no damage when it someday falls.